The Dharma’s Usefulness and Uselessness — The Way Spiritual Genius Works

The deepest truth cannot be taught.
It rises within the individual like a sun breaking through its own clouds,
owing nothing to speech, scripture, or persuasion.
For this reason the spiritual genius knows that the ultimate Dharma
is never transmitted from one being to another—
it is uncovered from within, or not at all.

And yet, out of compassion, the great ones still speak.
They cast out teachings like bridges for the trembling,
offering reasonable words, simple methods,
skillful explanations that meet the seeker where he stands.
These are not the truth itself—
they are the gentle venom that loosens the grip of confusion.
Like the great serpent who first softens its prey,
the spiritual genius uses teachings to relax the mind’s resistance
until the seeker falls into the vast, quiet mouth of his own peace—
pure, unbounded, inexhaustible.
This is not the teacher’s realm but the seeker’s own awakened ground,
the reality that has waited behind every thought since the beginning.

From this, the path becomes obvious:
meditation is not useless,
for only through inner cultivation does one awaken
the truth that cannot be handed across by another.
Likewise, teaching is not useless,
for without guidance the mind rarely finds the doorway
to its own immeasurable depths.

If study alone were enough, practice would be meaningless.
Words would replace transformation,
and wisdom would collapse into sterile recitation.
If practice alone were enough, teaching would serve no purpose.
No voice would call the lost toward the path,
and countless lives would wander without orientation.

Thus the spiritual genius stands at the intersection of both:
teaching that opens the gate,
practice that walks through it.
Together they reveal the secret
that liberation is neither inherited nor bestowed—
it is recognized, embodied, and finally lived
from the silence at the center of one’s own being.